There's an Econtalk episode on the economics of recycling.

http://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-recycling/

Aside from aluminium, there doesn't seem to be much of a point of recycling even though city governments keep doing it. (Even for stuff like aluminium cans, the rate of recycling has decreased, because the can design has improved and each can uses very little aluminium.)

But innovations in the field of recycling would over time alleviate these issues. Stopping the recycling efforts altogether would also halt these innovations.

And by charging a (relatively) large amount of money for getting rid of trash - like they do in Switzerland - is a great tool of both raising awareness with consumers, improving habits, and making recycling economically viable in the meantime.

> So if recycling makes no sense why do I and everyone else here in Switzerland do it?

Here near Seattle, it's mandated by law. Do laws require recycling in Switzerland? Each of the recycling facts may be true in small runs of sorted material. It is more difficult to make these true in large runs of unsorted material.

Tangent: Where are the AI that should sort these for us?

Not everything is required to be sorted by law but regular trash is abhorrently expensive and if you try to dispose of it without paying they have people who's job it is to go through those bags and find out who dumped it. So you try to minimize the amount of trash you generate by recycling everything you can. Additionally stores are required to keep packaging if you request it and you can dispose of old electronics at any place that sells electronics. Compacting your trash without paying extra will also result in a fine and so does placing your trash outside not on trash day (at least in some places). Thankfully we have theses (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhbhvdvTWUg) in a lot of places so you can dump your trash anytime.

> You can dispose of old electronics at any place that sells electronics.

That is true of the European Union in general. However, I suspect that a lot of the old electronics thrown away find themselves to one of those African recycling dystopias where poor people just melt down circuit boards, inhaling toxic fumes all day long. I find it difficult to believe that some decade-old mobile phone or clock that I drop off at a shop’s collection point, actually goes to a high-tech, safe recycling center.

My town in Japan has 7 different categories of garbage (it's different for each city). They wouldn't take my plastic garbage for ages because I didn't know what "puramaaku ari" and "puramaaku nashi" meant. Eventually I figured out that it was "pla-mark", or the plastic recycling mark. So you have to put plastic with the recycling mark in "puramaaku ari" bags and plastic without the recycling mark in the "puramaaku nashi". You're required to write your name on the bags, so they deliver your badly sorted trash bags to your door :-) I think it took me about 3 months to figure it out. I had a mountain of plastic trash in my shed that I slowly disposed of over the next year. At least here it's a very effective method to get people to do their sorting. People even clean their garbage!

Seattle traded one 4-bin system (glass, plastic, aluminum, garbage) for a 3-bin system (recycle, compost, garbage). And the documentation is available in numerous languages, including Japanese. :) This system sounds like a mix of both, with 1 bin more thrown in for fun.

Does having such strict controls on disposal make you think twice before buying something - have you ever thought "I like that, but how would I dispose of the packaging?"

Personally, it absolutely has. Especially some of the garbage doesn't get collected very often (for example glass is once a month) and we don't have room in the apartment to store trash. So for example, I'll buy beer in cans because aluminium compacts well in the bags and so I can store it easily. I used to prefer glass bottles because the size is convenient (600 ml rather than 500 ml, which is perfect for sharing with my wife), but in our current apartment (which has less space) we haven't bought glass bottles for years. Also, just yesterday, I had a choice between not very nice fresh tomatoes (the season really gets going in October here) and canned tomatoes. The canned tomatoes would have been much better quality for what I was doing (cooking), but I really didn't want to deal with the can (which is hard to crush and takes up a lot of room).

On the downside, non-recyclable plastic is kind of at an advantage because it compacts really well. Also, burnable trash (which is basically paper and organic waste) is easy to dispose of because it is collected twice a week (hot countries need to do this). So a lot of my neighbours have mountains of cardboard and plastic bags (we're pretty careful anyway, so generally it's not too bad). It would be great if there was a compostable category that was collected often that didn't take cardboard. That way the cardboard could come once a month and I'm sure it would cut down on paper packaging.

Of course, this works well because we have no room for trash. In other parts of the world where people have garages as big as my entire apartment, I think it would have considerably less effect.

> they have people who's job it is to go through those bags and find out who dumped it.

How do they ensure GDPR compliance? What about privacy?

> 2/3 of the glass collected is turned into new bottles.

It's a seriously dumb process. Take a bottle, crush it, melt it down, and make new bottles. What was wrong with the old bottles?

In Sweden there's a "standard glass bottle" for 33cl soft drinks, and they get washed and reused when you return them for your deposit. Typically a single bottle gets reused around 20 times.

They've almost completely disappeared from the market in favor of aluminum cans and 50cl PET bottles due to consumer preference (lighter weight, less fragile)

> It's a seriously dumb process. Take a bottle, crush it, melt it down, and make new bottles. What was wrong with the old bottles?

Washing the old bottles takes energy, water, and manpower. Making new ones uses less of all three of those, it's as simple as that.